Just curious. I sometimes let my computer run for days on end without rebooting…usually because I get interrupted doing something and would like to go back to it. Of course, with an SSD, it takes all of about 10 seconds to reboot…but just wondering if you guys reboot daily, after each sim, or less frequently?
Uhm, I usually only turn on the PC to use it and shut it down afterwards.
If I reboot is only if I encountered a problem.
Which, as of late, admittedly is kinda rare…
Normally I turn on the computer when I am home from work, and turn it off when I go to sleep.
The only exceptions are downloads that take several hours because DAMMIT MY INTERNET IS F***ING SLOW!
Ahem. yeah.
1 Like
I shut down nightly as well. If I don’t, the room gets uncomfortably warm.
2 Likes
Having a 1k Watts power supply and an overall powerful system, I’d also factor in the electricity bill…
I know consumption drops with no load but still, a “little bit power” times “lotsa-hours-in-a-day” isn’t equal to zero.
1 Like
In the US electric power costs, on average, about 12 cents per kilowatt hour. If your system was eating that full kilowatt all day long that would be an electric bill of $2.88 a day, or about $86 a month! yikes! Depending on where you’re living, that 1,000W of heating either helps reduce your heating bill, or adds more work for your AC to do, which isn’t cheap either.
Of course, not everybody’s system eats a full kilowat, but even a quarter of that power is still $.86 cents day, or $26 a month.
That said, how much do you spend on coffee a month? Or soda and snacks? 
That last question is invalid, since you actually benefit from spending money on soda and snacks. Having a PC and its peripherals heat up a room needlessly while you are not even there is kinda bad. I refuse to spend even five bucks a month on that. 
I even switch off the multiple socket outlet next to my PC because there are so much things plugged in that need even more power for doing basically nothing at all.
Oh, btw: In Germany a kilowatt hour is around 30 cents…
But if you get credits for running large loads at off-peak hours to help even out the demand profile, that might actually work in your favor… Every now and again I’ll keep my PC up overnight both to heat the office in winter and to make large downloads. Most of the time though, I shut down when I’m done doing whatever I was doing.
Boot and shutdown, daily. But I might sometimes reboot to update software (like windows or AV). Sometimes I let it run over night if I need to defragment and optimize my mechanical HDD. Or if I was listening to an audiobook and too tired to write down were I was, I’ll leave it overnight.
Windows is on a SSD, so boot time is 10 secs.
How many kWh are you typically generating, and are you storing any, or putting it all straight into your main panel?
Oh. Oh well I stand corrected then! 
It is a 7.5kW installation. During the day (most days)…it is generating far more than our house uses. We don’t have a battery bank (unfortunately), so we use Duke Energy Net Metering…which means we basically run the house on the solar generated, and whatever excess gets piped back into the grid for Duke to use. We get a credit for that.
Snapshot of what we’ve generated today. That blue bar represents the peak theoretical output of the array…which we only ever occasionally reach due to…well, thermodynamics I guess. The array heats up…we lose some energy in that and transmission and conversion from DC to AC.
And here is our month so far…
I’ve been very happy with the setup. It just sits up there doing its thing…it’s a good feeling…
1 Like
And this is what a high output day with no clouds looks like. March…so it’s cold, keeps the array cold. But of course you have limited daylight compared to summer (length of day). We’d do better if we cut some trees on the very eastern and western side of our yard. The reason the graph isn’t perfect is due to the shadowing of the trees in the early morning and late afternoon. But I like my trees too… 
2 Likes
My gaming PC gets shutdown at night and when I leave home - it boots up in seconds so it’s no bother. The Macbook pro just sleeps for months on end, and I think it draws <1 watt at sleep…
My pc is on full time. My monitors shut down depending on my Power Option - when gaming I set the monitor to never turn off. I tried a power plan to put my computer to sleep but it resists.
They are on when I am using them, and off when I am not.
I boot up after work and shut down before bed.
I boot up everyday I use it and shut it down after I’m done.